Ariane Andrew aka Cameron

Transcript

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Like, I don't mean to make a joke, but, like, Hotel Rwanda was so moving and so important at the same time, and yet you've and and it's about such an important historical topic, and you hit it from so many ways, in terms of the issue. Mhmm. But at the same time, it's still a story, and that's how you communicate it. Yeah. So so really, I wanna get right to the heart of the matter, which is, a, where do you come from? Like, why why is suffering and art so interwoven with you? Mhmm. And, b, how do you do it? So those are the kind of the main things I wanna cover. So so who the hell are you? I'll answer that. The one word answer to the first question. I'm from Belfast in Ireland. Oh, I couldn't tell from your accent, but Why do you empathize with suffering? I'm from Ireland. I'm Irish. And, And and just to mention, by the way, you're Irish, and you even mentioned in one interview that I've read that, you know, obviously, the Rwandan genocide was a a genocide, but you you do make some parallels between what happens in Ireland to to Rwanda. Very much so. I mean, I grew up in Belfast right at the I was 7 16 when this phase of the troubles broke out. 1969 was the it's it it sort of rolled from 1966 through 1969. As you were about, like, 17 Yeah. At that time? Yeah. I went I mean, it was my formative years. From 69 through till 78, I was deeply embroiled in the the whole the troubles of the war. And it really and it had a it went from classically, from a civil rights uprising to a street rebellion to guerrilla warfare to this very, focused, not high-tech, but very intense war between the IRA and the British through that period. And and that that for me was my education. But like you say, 1969 was not only the peak of that, it was the peak of sort of youth revolutions all around, like in France, in the US, but in Ireland in particular because you're dealing with this sort of national uprising as well and and civil rights and so on. So how did you personally get involved in what was going on? Well, we were I mean, that was the time of, you know, the the the uprising in Paris, the civil rights movement in the United States, and what was taking place in Northern Ireland, we saw as part of that worldwide movement, of people struggling for civil rights as was basically the Catholic population had felt and were oppressed by a, you know, a dictatorship or a a dominant government that discriminated against, the Catholic population. So there was a sense of indignation, but also a sense of allegiance with what was taking place in the United States, what was taking place in Europe. You know? And and the the people I grew up with, just felt invigorated by that and became involved in a civil rights movement. But because of the history of Ireland, that civil rights movement was deeply intertwined with the question of Ireland being divided by the British north and south, you know, that the that the British had, occupied Ireland, had left the southern part, and still occupy the north. So there was this thing of civil rights meets this national struggle, and the IRA had been, you know, the dominant they had actually driven the British out in the south and were still a potent force in the north. So you had a weird mix there of, like, civil rights movement and guerrilla movement going on. Right. So but but you're almost, like, separating it in terms of, like, civil rights movement slash Yeah. You know, IRA and youth slash guerrilla movement. But somehow or other, it all sort of merged together. Like, you you were participating. You weren't just sort of protesting in the streets. What what was actually going on in in your life at that moment? Yeah. Well, I would you know, everybody was participating. If you were Catholic and you were from these working class neighborhoods, you were just embroiled in this literally. There were it went from the police force, which is totally dominated by the the the unionist Protestant government, attacking those areas. And they the police force being backed up by sort of loyalist militia and Protestant gangs. And then when the British army came in in 69, they quickly switched to supporting that establishment. So you you ended up living in a neighbor in an area, a neighborhood that was under siege from not just this police force, this sectarian police force, but then by the British army. So you were basically under siege. It was a classic situation of, a local population being dominated by an occupation army as we saw it. And and so you're very young, angry. Your friends are starting to get connected up to, you know, more active parts of this movement. What was your path through this movement? Because now there's a there's a long time between 1969 and when you started getting more active in, let's say, other issues in the film industry and so on. Yeah. So, okay, what takes you from 1969 all the way through to Rwanda? Like, what's kind of the artistic path? What's the you I know you were a journalist covering these issues. Like, how did you kind of start to translate suffering to story? Well, what took me there, my my own personal experience in Northern Ireland were, you know, I I grew up, in my my family were from a working class Catholic neighborhood. My father aspired to be middle cla*s. He had a small auto shop. He fixed cars. He sold secondhand cars, and he moved up into a middle class predominantly partisan neighborhood. Did they treat him okay? No. As well, they did before when after 69 when the trolls blew up, we were quickly, like, persecuted. The house was wrecked. The windows were broken. We were driven out of there. And at the same time, the neighborhood where he had come from, which is this very hardcore Catholic IRA neighborhood that was basically under siege from a sort of all of East Belfast, which is where we were from, became a when the troubles were gone, became a really hardcore IRA area. And that, because of the division in in the society then, was where I had to go to hang out as a kid. I couldn't hang out in the neighborhood where I where we had our house. Were you picked on, like, by other people? Yeah. We could be I know I was like, our wall was painted like no pope here, and I was a Fenian, and I got beaten up in f**king playgrounds and s**t like that. Yeah. There was definitely a a sense that you were not welcome, those to put it mildly. I just wanna I just wanna add that the way you just put it. You were beat up in f**king playgrounds. Like, just why playgrounds? Because I remember there was an incident where we went to a couple of times where I went with, a cousin and went to a playground and somebody fingered us as, like, there are phineons, which was the slang for Catholics. And we literally got beat up and chased over, you know, and who was it? There was all these, you know, these funny incidents you recall from your childhood. I joined this thing called Saint John's Ambulance, which was like a volunteer, ambulance corps. And when you're a kid, it meant you got to go to, like, football matches because you were doing 1st aid and s**t like that. You know, you could stand at the sideline, or you could go to your cinema as the 1st aid person. And I went to this cinema one time, the Windsor Cinema on the Woodstock Road, and somebody threw a f**king hole at the whole chair of the the cinema. Like, the seat darned at me. And I I thought I didn't know what I thought. I thought, like, there was some mistake or something like that, and the woman says you better get out of here. And I said, what? Because you're a Fenian, you know, they're Can I ask a naive question? Because I don't really know the answer, so it's totally naive. But Protestants and Catholics are all Christians, and I know there's a lot of strife between them. But when you get right down to the core of what Jesus said, what's what's the big deal? It's not it's economics. You have to understand the history of Europe and the history of the British Empire Mhmm. And the division of it. Like, okay, you know, Henry the 8th was a Christian. Right. But he dropped his head away from 500 years ago though. But that that legacy or that culture of the division of European society into, you know, the Catholic society and the Protestant Martin Luther and then Huguenots That that's caused as much violence as the Shia Sunni division has done today more so. And it it crystallized in Northern Ireland because in Ireland, the British used that division as a way to control the country. And and, you know, it's I know it's 500 years of history. But being Jewish, you know, like, you know, you're dealing with 2000 years or whatever. It's the legacy of that, and, ultimately, it ends up in economics. The the Catholic nationalist population in Northern Ireland were the, you know, the underclass, and the the, the Protestant working class population felt as though they were the privileged cla*s. They were the the ship builders. They were the ones that helped build the British Empire. They had been in part by, their allegiance to the crime. So so okay. So so starting from that then, you this movement is kind of breaking out. What's and I know you got into journalism. It's kind of your first foray into telling this story of what was happening. Yeah. And what separated you out from, let's say, other journalists who were just simply reporting the news, like this happened here, this happened here, to someone who starts telling stories? What separates out the story from the news? Well, I had a sense when I first came to New York and I worked in I was a fact checker at New York Magazine, and I was freelancing music journalism for Rolling Stone and Village Voice and stuff like that. But I I I I had left Ireland just after the the IRA hunger strike, the Boris Sands hunger strike, which was quite a unique, bizarre event. And What was happening? Well, basically, what happened was that the IRA prisoners had been had fought for and had been accorded a sort of prisoner of war status where they were held in in camps, where, you know, they'd be in a a compound with tents and so forth, and they'd control themselves. Margaret Thatcher decided that this was, pandering the terrorists. She took tried to take this, what they called political or prisoner war status away, and the IRA prisoners went on a hunger strike. And I think there were, like, 80 of them on hunger strike at one point, but 10 of them died, most famously or infamously, Bobby Sands that, you know, was the first of the 10 to die. And this, that that that particular event and that whole prison camp, which I'd been in. Why were you in it? Because I was arrested by the British Army and charged with, like, supporting the IRA. And, so I I had a sense of this f**king amazingly bizarre and unique place that was, like, a crucible for what was going on in Northern Ireland, and I wrote a play about it. Because I didn't there there have been a lot of journalism written, but I thought nobody's written a play about this that kind of gets inside what took place in the camp. But but kind of it was a lot of banal stuff, and I wrote a play called The Tunnel. And I took a day, a guy called Jim Sheridan, and who was running the Irish Arts Center, on West 51st between 10th and 11th. Still there. And, and Jim took the play and put it on. And it was by off off Broadway, standards pretty successful. It ran for 6 months. Wow. And then Sharon came to me and said he wanted first, he wanted to turn it into a movie, but he wanted to shoot the movie within the theater itself because it was all set within a a hut and his prison cab. And I got sort of semi decent reviews, and I went, yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe and he said to me famously or infamously, he said, well, I'm gonna have to do this. I'm gonna write this script about Christy Brown, you know, and maybe shoot this film. And and I said, oh, yeah. You know, drunken Irish, that'll be a f**king big hit. And that turned into my left foot. Are you kidding? Yeah. So Jim went off and, you know, wrote and directed Daniel Day Lewis in my left foot. And I ran the Irish Arts Center for the next year. I was, like, the artistic director while he was away. And so did you start to think, oh my gosh. It's this is accessible to me that the taking this piece of suffering that had already translated into a play because the journalism, as you said, was ba**l. Yeah. And it is possible to turn something horrific into into a movie. No. I never thought of it as, like, horrific into a movie. I thought that if you want to transmit the emotions that you'd experienced and the passion that people had, you had to find a universal language for that rather than the local politics that bored people Yeah. Or turn them off. So what do you mean by the universal language? Because because suffering happens in all forms, personal, political, historical. But I'm not I'm not interested in soft I mean, I am interested in suffering. I'm interested in alleviating it. What I'm most interested in is people who overcome that or deal with it and rise above it. The the the capacity to take that suffering and turn it into something good or to challenge evil in a way on a an ordinary personal level to find, you know, as John Nell and in John Nell's movie are so sorry. John Nell's song, working house hero working class hero is kind of it's kind of ironic, but I actually believe in working class heroes, you know, that you can find ordinary people who triumph over extraordinary circumstances. So so, this is kind of a side question, but a lot of people feel you sort of have to hit rock bottom in life to kind of make a move up. Do you feel that there could just be sort of a a like, working class hero is not necessarily a rock bottom, but you could kinda find heroism in, in kind of this just general wear and daily wear and tear that society does. I think there's a moment, there's a chemistry where people find a spark. There's something that ignites them or hits something inside them that triggers greatness in in in in a very sort of, important yet not sort of, I'm struggling here for this, that they they come to greatness through just the moment where there's a tipping moment where they say, I wanna stand up against something or I'm gonna do something. You know, I can't deal with this anymore. Like, the great network movie, you know, where Yeah. What did you say? I can't take, I'm not I forget the exact quote now. It's famous. I'm mad as hell, and I can't take it. The the mad as hell. I'm not taking it. Yeah. But the but it was mad as hell. Yeah. So what was the what ignited you? What was the moment taken at you? No. I I don't think there's there'd be you know, there's moments to remember. For me, what ignited me was knowing that I could write drama that people would, be be moved by, that they would empathize. Why why drama? Like, what at this point had most influenced you in from an artistic point of view? Well, I I As opposed to writing nonfiction about the politics or the stories or whatever. You know, I I mean, I I work for great journalists. I work for Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Peter Maas, you know, but New York Magazine, at that time, I when I was a fact checker and their research, I worked for the best. But I understood that drama if you get drama right and mostly through movies. If you can get drama right, it transcends journalism. It takes people inside a situation that they can never experience. And and the reason for that was films like, you know, Schindler's List, Red's, Missing, you know, even Apocalypse Now, great political movies that you when you you feel like you you become part of that situation or And it's interesting because, like, Schindler's List is a great example. It's a political movie, but, obviously, even, like, Hitler has never seen or mentioned, it's just about this guy, Oscar Schindler, and then, of course, the the general or commander played by Ralph Yeah. Feynman. Feynman. Yeah. So so you don't necessarily have to deal with kind of like, even in Hotel Rwanda Yeah. We actually have never understand what the full political drama is. It's just it's just very clear what is happening and what the story is. No. It's for me, it's it's about boiling it down to it's a distillation of boiling those emotions down to their, their essence, and then presenting that in a universal way. Like, with it I mean, the way Hotel Rwanda happened was at the time, I was trying to write a a script about Liberia, Sierra Leone, and, boy soldiers and all of that time because it it was, like, being ignored. It was just when, Charles Taylor was in charge of Liberia, and I thought this is the most outrageous crazy thing, and nobody's doing anything about it. And so I I I tried to write a script. And in the middle of that, my agent gave me a script by, Keir Pearson, this, guy who's an editor at, I think he was at New York Times at the time. Anyway and in in his script was the story of Paul Russet Sabagina. You You know, this guy who hotel an ordinary hotel manager who actually had, like, western had been taught in Belgium and was, you know, sort of eurosycophant. And suddenly, he was put in a position where he had to rescue his family, and then that family expanded into saving this whole hotel and then the people who came in there. And I thought this is this is a way to tell the Rwandan genocide, which is pretty incomprehensible to It's totally incomprehensible. Yeah. Which is why do you think if you had actually went into the explanation of the genocide, it would have taken away from the artistry them into a position of becoming extremist. Yeah. And them into a position of becoming extremist. And there there were a couple of the things about the Rwanda genocide that I mean, the the Hutu, militia, when I was turning it into a film, the Hutu militia had these incredibly colorful, outfits that they have, and and and I started to see this division. Okay. The Hutu militia are in these crazy shirts. You know, the UN are in these blue the blue helmets. The the Hutu army are in the army uniforms, and the Houthi, the refugees are basically in there. I had, like, color division. Here's the way they explain who's going on here. It's basically hate. You know, it's like fear. The Hutu majority population are in fear of the 2 the Tutsi stealing their land. Though it was a common denominator that you see in the Middle East that I saw in Northern Ireland that you see in Asia. It's interesting because in the movie, it almost you you almost get a little confused, like, because everyone's hating everyone else. Yeah. See, sometimes you don't know who's shooting at at who. Right. But the core story, you know, the love story, the saving story, the fact that it almost the Schindler's List like story where he's using the hotel to to save 100 or even over a 1000 refugees, that becomes the core thing. And so, again, it's this, like, you you sort of, like, distill the suffering down to its essence of fear Mhmm. And then use that to tell the story to to move the story along. I mean, it's hard to take the ordinary person and put them in that situation. And I'm always looking for the eye. Who who is the audience in any movie? You know, what character is the, surrogate for the audience? Like, in Hotel Rwanda, it was probably Sophie, the wife, rather than Paul because she's the she's the suffering person. She's, you know, she's watching this. And then in the name of the father, which I And that's really interesting because so so just for people who haven't even seen it, there's the guy who's the hero played by Don Cheadle, who's almost as he almost becomes larger than life once he realizes his mission of saving all these 1200 refugees in all these stores in the Yeah. Where he saves through the hotel. But then his wife, I never I didn't think of it that way. She's the ordinary person Yeah. Experiencing this. She's the working class hero. Yeah. Because Paul was always he was initially selfish. He's motivated by his sort of, you know, Euro file. He was worried about losing his job. Losing his job, and he wants to look after the westerners, and the whites sell him out at the end of the day, and he's stuck there, and he's still bargaining with the, the militia and so forth. The purity of the thing is Tatiana who's watching him and saying, no. You've this is what you're gonna do. You can't, you know, you can't shuffle me off until some, evacuation. And and I wrote in the name of the father, which I wrote with Jim Sheridan and he directed, which was about a guy called Jerry Conlon who was Daniel Day Lewis? Yeah. Right. But in that in that film, his father, played by Peter Pusselswit, was the great working class hero. He was the father who came over to try to rescue his son, and then trying to rescue his son was, imprisoned. And it was actually we often say this. It was basically the story of Pinocchio. You know, it's the it's the bad child who's swallowed by the wheel, and the father goes into the belly of the wheel and rescues him. And the child becomes a good child, and the father dies, which was the the ending name of the father story. But it was, again, it was Puss, Pete Puss, the actor, who personified this nobility of the ordinary person who does something great. And and it's the same with Schindler. If you look at the, you know, Schindler's list, missing Jack Lemmon's great movie about the Chilean, about the Pinochet, you know, the Pinochet years and that, coup. And what else? The Killing Fields. You know, there there are it's all the way to tell a story to a universal population is to get them engaged with a character who they can empathize with. And so so it's not necessarily Oscar Schindler or Mhmm. You know, the I I don't even know how to pronounce the name, the Don Cheadle character in Hotel Rwanda. At the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's the person that they're reflecting off of almost. Like, in this case, in Hotel Rwanda, the wife. Yeah. To some degree. But an Oscar Schindler I mean, the great thing about Oscar Schindler was he was such a rogue. He, you know So he had his own vulnerability as it was John John Cheadle kind of rose above that vulnerability. Well, as I said, he was to to some extent, not quite as well with Oscar Schindler. You know, and it's one of my I wish at the end of it, not and it's a genius movie that Oscar had to remain quite the rogue than he was. You know? But, but it's it's those it's those it's it has to be people that you know and recognize. It can't be, like, you know, goddesses are great, like, huge, hero kind of plastic heroes or superheroes. Right? I I'm I'm always looking for real characters who are people who have transcended the situation they're in. So so I'm just trying is a good you know, that's a classic Yeah. Company. So that's a great one too. Yeah. So so it seems like now I'm I'm piecing together and just totally correct me where I'm wrong. There's kind of this global catastrophe, not global, but there's this systemic kind of catastrophe that's happening someplace, whether it's in Erin Brockovich, the poisoning by a big corporation of some land, or in Rwanda, there's this genocide that nobody could possibly understand. Like, it's an insane genocide. So there and you don't even have to explain all the details. We just have to we just have to understand that fear exists, and it's insane. And then there's this character that somehow his arc or her arc is to transcend from ordinary person to almost larger than life person, and then there's kind of the stories around that that create human frailty and vulnerability and fear, where where we, the audience, can feel fear. So for instance, I've never been to Rwanda. I actually don't know the details at all of the genocide other than the fact that it's insane, nor do you explain it in the movie, but I can yet relate completely to the the fear. Mhmm. And I can also want to I can aspire to be the Don Cheadle character, so I'm feeling both. So what's I feel like there's some formula in there, not a direct formula, but something where it it lights up your creativity. It's not a formula. It's like recognizing that in any given situation, people can transcend their their ordinary life and and come to a place where they they stand up for something and that we can that gives us a hope as well, but that is not ridiculous. It's not like they suddenly take off and fly and catch someone falling from a building. Right. It took Don Quito a while. It took him many, many episodes. Well, it's you could you could and should be Don Shiel in that situation. You could and should be Schindler, Oscar Schindler. You know, you could and should be, I forget the name of the guy and the killing freak. These are people who we should aspire to be, not on any superhero level, but also on the level of common decency, so that when you leave the cinema you feel I the the the big thing for me about cinema at the moment is the only emotions that Hollywood is interested in sending the people out to tour with is, like, golly gee. Wow. Their eyes are spinning because they've seen so much explosions and their ears are breaking. I'm Ant Man. Yeah. I could shrink down and save lives. I could give a s**t. I want people to go out with, like, tears running down their face. Their heart pumping, there's and feeling this is my next door neighbor, and I should be there. Those are, like, deeper emotions. We've given up on deeper emotions in the cinema. No. And and I felt that in Hotel Rwanda, you feel like you can it's almost like this little injection you get. You feel like you could be better than yourself by just aspiring to be the Don Cheadle character Yeah. Or the Oscar Schindler like character who is sacrificing his own life to save all these thousands of people or 1200 people in in the Hotel Rwanda case. So so but, again, I'm really just fascinated by the idea of transforming suffering into creativity. Like, what do you see in a in a historical or political or current story that you could say, I could do something with this and transform it into art? Well, I mean, it's not it's overcoming suffering that I'm interested in rather than Right. You know, tapping into it, and I think you can go you can find I don't I don't I'm not, like, mining for stories. Here's what to tell, but I want you know, you look at situations in the world today, and it's got I mean, we, you know, we used to think the 20th century with, like, the horrors of the holocaust and this genocide and all was, like, the worst century ever. And then we've moved into the 21st where we've actually reverted to the f**king not just the 15th century but the 8th century. Right. You know, we're back with the caliphate and you know the medieval crusades and all and suddenly you're like wow. And there's refugees swarming across from, you know, the Middle East until Europe, and and you wanna find what what's the motivation that can bring people to understand what's going on in Syria at the moment or what's going on in Mexico or what's going I wanna take audiences into that place. So it's it's an interesting combination between journalism, where you just kind of dictate what the events are happening, and storytelling, where you sort of find this core emotion that can be really explored in this arc of character. And where would you say is the gap? Like, clearly, I don't wanna use the word selling out even though I just said that phrase, but clearly you're not doing Jurassic Park 4. You know, that's not on your agenda for the future. And where is the gap between the storytelling you do and the Jurassic Parks, which do sell a $1,000,000,000 worth of tickets? Well, that's I mean, that do you have to accept that, you know, it's like accepting Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post and stuff. That's what's you know, And Fox News and reality television. It's what people want to escape their own not their mundane lives. They just as escapism, they do that. If if you're dealing in deeper subjects, then it requires more time to be spent. It's not I I don't find any more nobility in what I'm doing over somebody, you know, doing the 6th episode of Star Wars or whatever. But but why? Because it seems like, again, I watch Hotel Rwanda, and I feel nobility. I feel like I can be Oh, good. Maybe that's character. Yeah. But maybe that's what I wanna tap into other emotions that people need to feel. I think in entertainment at the minute, we're on a serious sugar rush. You know? If you go into the cinema, you're just gonna get high on the flashbang of it all and that. And you gotta understand that, you know, f**king all brand and healthy foods are just as good, and they can actually taste as good, or you can leave the cinema with a different feeling. Because I I do remember even when I was a kid growing up, you know, my mother used to take me to these, certainly. The there were these old sort of classic weepies weepy, movies that they'd make. But then and in the 60 and the seventies and the eighties, the great films were tapping into deeper the different emotions. You know, like like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter and you know, the great political moon movies of the time, the Costa Bravas, and that that you came out with a different emotion from the cinema than you get now. The only time you get those emotions is between, like, October January when the Oscars are right now. Suddenly, you get hit up with, like, the important movies. But I think it's very satisfying to come away from a movie where you feel you've been moved in a way that you're just not being entertained. You know? So so let's say, an aspiring young filmmaker, and I'd like to do what what you've done in fashion, that sort of career you've done without necessarily going to Hollywood and signing up for Ant Man 4 or whatever. What what should I be looking for in terms of learning or learning how to write or learning how to, you know, what process should I start thinking about? I don't know. I mean, I think if you look at the you know, if you take, like, Cary Fukunawa who just did piece of no nation, and he did true detective and True detective. Okay. And he wrote every single word of true detective. Well, before that Very unusual for a TV series. No. He did Sanomre, and and and he did a short film that was the basis of that. He's a classic example of going and finding something. Like, his short film was basically about, Mexican illegals trying to get into the United States. And those transmitting emotion. I mean, we're in the business of communication. Right? That's that all of us. This is what this is about. We're communicating with each other. Film is about communication. If you can communicate emotion in its rawest level, then that's how you're gonna be successful. And then so stupid question again. How do you think about because there's there's sort of as you said before, with Sugar Rush, there are very sugary ways to communicate emotion, and then there are very real ways to communicate emotion. And if, you know, you obviously weren't at the Rwanda genocide, but you related it to your experiences in Ireland. What's kind of a method of sort of feeling that emotion for in the inside and putting it out on the paper in a real way that's not Well, you know, I'm not look. I think a lot of it is some of it's personal experience that you that you have to do the work. You have to talk to people and feel that and do the research and feel that viscerally to actually you can't you can't go to UCLA film school and know how people feel in Aleppo. You know? You can't do that. It doesn't transmit. You can go to UCLA Film School and know how people feel on f**king star x y z. You know? That's okay. They they go That's where I normally live. Well, that's, yeah, that's an invention. You know, what real life suffering and and the little nuances of what take place in that is is it that's personal experience, and you've gotta get out and work with that. And then for like, I you you know, when we were doing Hotel Rwanda and even in this in the promise, the, the film I'm doing at the moment, I had I had a sort of mantra or catchword, and it's Peoria. And the thing is, if they don't get it in Peoria, Illinois, you fail. Right? You have to be able to crystallize and turn that drama into something that communicates not just in Peoria, but in Belfast and Beirut and in Bangkok in some way to universalize that. And that that's about finding those, you know, universal moments of suffering and emotion and joy. Well, you you mentioned joy, and it brings me, it it made me think when I was watching Hotel Rwanda Yeah. There's these intense, horrible moments. Like, he you know, I'm not giving any spoilers, but, obviously, he's there's dead bodies everywhere. It's 12 years old. Nice and spoilers. Yeah. Yeah. No need for spoilers. If you haven't seen the movie, you suck. Whatever. But, you know, in the middle of that though, the Don Cheadle character is still laughing and joking with his wife. They're trying to find those moments of of joy, which which I thought was very real too. Like, you're not just kind of trying to beat this message. It's not about the message. It's about the human experience. Yeah. No. You've all I mean, I there there's a sort of structure to it as well. You can't always be if you're I know, I mean, I did one movie that was unrelentingly bleak, called, reservation road, which is about Funniest movie ever. Yeah. No. No. Just kidding. Yeah. Which we all call the dead child in the road movie, you know. But and it wait. It's it it, and I learned that you've gotta even within the worst horror, there's moments of joy that people have or humor or laughter or whatever. You've gotta the audience needs a relief valve. Mhmm. You know? They just and and it's not that they're even planted. It's just I remember even from dude, I mean, you look back I look back on Belfast now and when I grew up, and I remember the funny, crazy, stupid stuff along with it, the horrific stuff. You know, so so you did a a short movie, The Shore, which won an Academy Award about your experiences in Belfast to some extent. Yeah. And so do you ever see yourself again returning to that? Yeah. I'm gonna try and do a feature film out of The Shore. The great thing about the shore was it was during, I just written Inside Man 2 for Spike. We were trying that because I rewrote, I was the the second writer on Inside Man with Spike, and and then he wanted to do Inside Man 2, and I did a version of that. And there was some other s**t going on in Hollywood, and I could it was one of those constantly going into, like, big story meetings with 15 people saying, you know, what if he turned into, like, a wasp and flew? I don't know why. I'm sitting there trying to smile. Well, what do you do in that situation? Like, so so presumably, they're pulling you in because you're gonna be able to take this comic book like scenario and get the raw emotion out of it. Yeah. It's my guess is why they're bringing you in. For some form. Exactly. And so what do you do in that case? Okay. I'm the wasp, and I'm gonna, like, shrink down and sting people. You know, I could always say stop myself in the neck. But you say, like, oh, he had a child who died, like, in the past, and he has a flashback about that? Or, like, what do you what's the formula? There was one point somebody said, well, we're doing it in the name of the father. Well, what would happen if, like, his father escaped or something like that? And I'm like, well, you know, this is a real story. He died in prison, so he can't really there's a there's a there's a detachment in Hollywood of, like, what if this happened? You know? And And I'm not the best one to tell these horrific, like, story by comedic, you know, stories because there's you you the thing about going to going to these story meetings in Hollywood is you come in and there's 12 people from the studio, and they're all clever All geniuses. They're all geniuses, but they are they're all very clever. But, you know, the head of the studio or the deputy is there. And then the the the somewhat the the next one down, and then you've got 10 people who work for them. And they all desperately feel as though if they don't say something, they're they're they have no contribution to make or they're not and the best thing they could actually do is, like, shut the f**k up and say nothing. You know? And let the person but they all come in with ideas. They have to say something. Yeah. I mean, there was one rewrite I did of a, a film where with a big movie star, and I went to these meetings, and I ended up getting 70 pages of notes. And I said, then why don't you just f**king shoot the notes and save yourselves all the money for paying for me? You know? You know, a normal script's a 110 pages, and they'd give me 70 pages of notes on the script. But, and what do you add to that script? Just just like I'm just trying to understand. Like, what do you bring to those big Hollywood esque meetings? What did I bring to it? I bring their hope that you'll fix something that's bad. You're brought in to fix you know, you're usually brought in as the second writer to fix something that's not working. What what might not be working? That that usually the whole f**king story. But, like, is there, like was it too much, like, they focus on, like, plot without human emotion, or, like, what happens what goes off the route? They well, they start with a concept. They have a concept rather than an intrinsic story that comes out of something, you know, that comes out of something that's that's actually exists in reality or or that that has a a personal vision of someone who's invented it. They they come up with the concept, and and then they start developing that concept. And everyone you have 6 people who are, in the studio, and they each have different ideas about that concept. And then they bring in a writer, and they articulate that concept. And then he has his spin on the concept, but it doesn't actually match theirs. I see. It's it's you you need you know, you write books. Right? You actually need, a concept that's held together by one person who has a vision. Once you start chiseling away at that, then you start, diminishing the concept itself. So you're brought in to kind of, like, say, look. Okay. Let's take a step back and fill in an underlying Yeah. This doesn't work. Can you do this? Can you do that? Mhmm. And it's usually a lot of money, and, you know, you're like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'll give that a try. And a lot of times, it it does work because it's sort of journeyman work stuff. You know? It's like building blocks of the story and how this works. And, but often then, your idea doesn't match with what the people around the table are. It's not for me, look, that works a lot of time in Hollywood. I I'm just a guy who wants to tell a particular story with particular emotions, and I need to be in control of that. And I shouldn't wander into this, like, great area of let's fix things here like this and that. You know? It's sort of for me, you've gotta be so invested in the story that you take it from start to finish. And if something within it doesn't work dramatically, then because you're invested in it, you know how to fix you know how to join. Right. You're, like, part of the whole story, every moment of it. Yeah. I can't deal with the let's, you know, let's make this all up collectively. You know? So so, again, to the aspiring young filmmaker, you've already mentioned several movies that have inspired you and motivated you. What are some books they could read to learn? Or For me, the aspiring young filmmaker today has everything at their, you know, at their disposal. I it was always for me the the the the intro was to go to a theater with the Irish Arts Center as it so happened with Jim Sheraton because you immediately become involved with actors, set designer, director, producer, like local theater. Get involved in something practical. Don't be sending a script to Hollywood. It's gonna be toilet paper, not even that. It's just gonna be recycled. They're not even gonna wipe their a*s with it. You know? Just try to get involved yourself. And and because of the way we work today, the Internet, the, you know, the d five camera, garage, but you can do your own movie. You you know, write a script, write something, write a short film, shoot it, see how it goes. If you have a concept and you think that can make it fly, then you've got your own distribution network. You've got your everything's at your disposal. You don't have to go to Hollywood. In fact, if you avoid that, there you're far better off. You know? So that's my advice to anyone who's aspiring to be a writer, director, or whatever is to, like, do it yourself. Find out, join a local theater or find out a group of people who you can work with and put something together that you think is unique. And if if it you know, on the Internet, on the web, if it ain't unique, you're gonna f**king know about it very quickly. You know? That's and and and so there's the the the the conventional way of bursting into Hollywood, I think, is gone completely now. You know? That's like, let's send a script and hope someone reads it. Nobody reads scripts that are sent. You know? Forget about it. Just No. Well, look. Terry, George, Hotel Rwanda. We're gonna have you back on again with the we we did one we talked about one genocide. We're gonna have you on again with the next genocide in a few months. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Super inspirational, and thank you very much. For more from James, check out the James Altucher Show on the Stansbury Radio Network at stansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today. The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeehl Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Frank Keane BMW on Dundee. Visit the Frank Keane BMW showroom on Dundee to find your next car. Dundee Motors, for confident car buying and deals to feel great about from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. Visit Dundee. Ie today.